Why Malls Keep Investing in Ambience When the Real Advantage Is Data

Originally published in Malls and Stores of the Future on March 9th, 2026

For decades shopping centres have operated on a simple assumption: build attractive spaces, lease to strong brands, and footfall will follow.

That model worked when brands were scarce and retail competition was limited. But as brands expand online and open multiple locations, a new question is emerging for landlords: how do shopping centres build loyalty to the asset itself rather than relying on the brands inside?

The Loyalty Gap

“Shopping centres think they have relationships with customers. They don’t,” says David James Nguyen, a former senior leasing executive turned retail technology founder. “That relationship belongs to the tenant.”

Customers are loyal to Nike, Rolex or Garmin – not the mall itself. When brands move locations or open nearby stores, the customer typically follows the brand which creates structural vulnerability for landlords. Shopping centres risk becoming interchangeable assets where tenant mix alone determines foot traffic.

Comparing the situation to airlines, Nguyen explains how they know their passengers intimately; they understand where their customers travel, how often they fly, whether they sit in economy or business class, and what loyalty tier they occupy. As a result, passengers are rewarded for their behaviour and encouraged to repeat spending.

Shopping centres rarely operate with such insight. Most landlords have limited visibility into which shoppers spend the most money, which tenants build the strongest customer relationships, or how often visitors return. The primary signal for many landlords is rent alone.

Traditional vs Competitive Mindsets

In most Western markets such as the UK, US and Australia, shopping centres operate within a traditional model built around strong brands, high base rents and long leases. These structures provide predictable income and keep landlords satisfied as long as stores perform and foot traffic remains steady. 

When the fundamentals appear to work, there is little incentive to rethink how customer relationships are built and innovation tends to be incremental rather than structural. 

In parts of Southeast Asia and the UAE, the dynamic looks very different. Shopping centres often sit within close proximity to one another and compete for the same global tenants. When identical brands appear across multiple malls, differentiation becomes difficult to achieve through tenant mix alone.

“Competition forces innovation,” says Nguyen. “When you have three malls next door with the exact same brands, you have to give people a reason to come back.” As a result, landlords in these markets have become more willing to experiment with digital infrastructure, using loyalty programmes, rewards ecosystems and data platforms to build relationships with customers at centre level rather than through individual tenants.

Marking the beginning of a deeper change in shopping centre operations, the next competitive frontier is gradually shifting from physical experience to customer intelligence.

The Mall of the Future: Customer Infrastructure

Shopping centres traditionally invest in physical upgrades that enhance ambience – larger atriums, redesigned food courts and entertainment precincts that aim to create appealing environments – problem is, these investments depreciate over time.

Digital infrastructure behaves differently. A centre level platform accessed through an app or web interface can guide customers to stores, distribute targeted rewards, and track behaviour across multiple visits. The result? A direct relationship between landlord and customer – something shopping centres have historically lacked.

“If you don’t know who your customers are, you can’t influence their behaviour,” says Nguyen.

Rewards can encourage visitors to return midweek rather than weekends. They can direct spending toward underperforming tenants or categories, and they can create incentives for customers to return within specific timeframes. Without identifying customers, none of these invaluable insights are possible.

What looks like a food-ordering app is, in Nguyen’s framing, the foundation layer of something much larger. “Everyone says I’m selling an app. The app is the Trojan horse.”

The Rewards Ecosystem

The core objective, according to Nguyen, is not convenience – it’s the creation of a centre-wide rewards ecosystem that allows landlords to understand their customers and influence habits. 

Once customers identify themselves through the platform, landlords gain visibility into how often visitors return, how much they spend, which tenants they prefer and when they visit. What appears to be a simple digital platform becomes the operating layer for the entire asset.

Generating frequent transactions and high engagement, food courts are the ideal start point for capturing customer behaviour. 

Once customers begin interacting with the platform, the rewards ecosystem can extend across the entire shopping centre from fashion, to dining, services and entertainment – the system evolves from a convenience tool into embedded infrastructure.

From Footfall to Revenue

Every decision a landlord makes revolves around three core metrics: moving annual turnover (MAT), foot traffic and income. Nguyen argues that digitisation can influence all three simultaneously: 

1. Rewards increase spending per visit, lifting tenant turnover.

2. Expiring incentives encourage repeat visits, creating predictable traffic patterns.

3. Platform transactions generate incremental revenue streams for landlords.

But revenue is only one outcome. The most consequential shift is visibility, and for the first time, via digitisation, landlords can measure how customers behave inside their asset.

Measurement Changes Everything

Shopping centre marketing is difficult to quantify. Seasonal decorations, influencer campaigns and promotional events may increase visibility, but the connection between marketing spend and tenant revenue is often opaque.

A closed loop digital ecosystem changes that dynamic. If landlords receive weekly data summarising platform activity, they can see how many customers used the system, how much they spent, which tenants performed best and which visitors generated the most revenue. 

In response, they can refine campaigns, allocate budgets more effectively and deploy targeted incentives. “You can’t improve what you can’t measure,” says Nguyen. In other words, marketing becomes measurable.

Signalling the emergence of shopping centres as retail media platforms where advertising, promotions and rewards are tied directly to measurable consumer behaviour that eventually becomes a competitive advantage.

The Compounding Advantage

For decades shopping centres competed primarily through architecture, ambience and tenant mix which are easy to replicate. Data behaves differently: “it compounds,” says Nguyen. The more a platform understands how visitors behave, the more intelligently the centre can shape the experience and encourage both new and returning visitors. 

As online commerce continues to reshape consumer expectations, the next competitive battleground for malls may not be the physical environment, but customer intelligence – which leaves landlords with an increasingly difficult question to ignore: 

Can shopping centres remain competitive if they continue operating without truly knowing their customers?